


Truce of the Space Games

by amyfortuna



Category: The Truce of the Games - Rosemary Sutcliff
Genre: Alternate Universe - Space, Don't Have to Know Canon, Gen, IN SPACE!, Now This Is Podracing, Olympics, canon remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-27 16:26:00
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,097
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12585940
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amyfortuna/pseuds/amyfortuna
Summary: Amyntas and Leon, in a different setting, in the same Games, in the same war.





	Truce of the Space Games

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chantefable](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chantefable/gifts).



It was still early by station time when the shuttle rose up from her overnight bay into the docking zone, ready for her passengers. Half the people on board the station _Athena_ , whether they were going on the _Paralos_ or not, were down at the bay, watching through the wide windows. The _Paralos_ was stopping by to collect the finest athletes of the _Athena_ and take them on the first stage of their journey to Olympia. 

Every fourth Old Earth Year it happened, every fourth year for over three thousand years. Nothing was allowed to stand in the way, not equipment malfunction, not disease quarantine, not even war -- even the long and weary war which, after a solar year of uneasy peace, had broken out again between the _Athena_ and the _Sparta_. 

Several months ago the _Herald_ had stopped by, proclaiming the Truce of the Games; safe conduct through all space lanes both for the athletes and those who went to watch them compete. 

Aboard the _Paralos_ was all the ordered bustle of departure, crew settling into their stations, passengers milling about on the afterdeck. Amyntas, son of Ariston, had drawn a little apart from the rest, after glancing down into the cargo bay below to be sure his brightly-painted racepod, the _Defender_ , was safely stowed. He was the youngest there, still several months from his eighteenth birthday, and somewhat conscious that he did not yet bear the Athenian tattoo that was a marker of military service. A few of the other boys on the deck even had scars gained in clashes with the Spartans. 

Amyntas envied them. He was proud that he had been picked so young to race for the _Athena_ in the Four Hundred Miles, a famous racecourse run a thousand times in simulation, up and down the mountains of Olympia, and out to the edge of the atmosphere. But he was lonely. He was bound in with all the others by their shared training; but they were bound together by something else, by another kind of life, other loyalties and shared experiences and private jokes, from which he was still shut out. 

The last couplings from the docking bay were slowly releasing now. Fathers and brothers and friends were sending last moment advice and good luck wishes, before they were out of reach of the signal from the station and all handheld devices went offline for space travel. No one texted Amyntas, but he turned and looked back to where his father stood among the crowd. Ariston had been a racer too in his day, before he went for a soldier and a Spartan shot caught his warpod, destroying it and leaving him with a stiff left knee, which put paid to his hopes of an Olympic Crown. Everyone said that he and Amyntas were very alike, and looking back now at the slight dark man who still held himself like a racer, Amyntas hoped with a warm rush of pride, that they were right. 

As the last connectors disengaged, he flung up his hand in salute, typing with the other, and tried to put all he would have wished to say in one last text message: "I'll race the best race I have in me, Father -- and if the Gods let me win, I'll remember that I'm winning for us both."

* * *

Five days later, finally on Olympia, a class-four planet circling round a middling-yellow sun, Amyntas awoke to dappled fingers of sunlight shafting in through the window of his room. They danced a little, as though broken by tree branches. To station-raised Amyntas, the world felt entirely new, as though it had been born that morning. He rolled over and lay looking up at the bare rafters for a few moments. Planetside, the ground was steady, and there were no soothing noises in the walls to lull him to sleep at night. It was entirely too quiet and still. 

He remained motionless for a moment, then arose, off the bed and through the doorway in one racer's dive of movement, sluicing his head and shoulders in the icy spring water in a fountain just outside. The water was fresh and clear, and tasted nothing like the water he was used to on the _Athena_. 

Amyntas came up for air, shaking the water out of his eyes. For a moment all he could see was the white marble court through the splintered brightness of flying droplets. And then suddenly, in the brightness, there stood a boy of his own age, who must have come out of the lodging close behind him. A boy with a lean, angular body, and a dark bony face under a shock of hair, ill-groomed. 

For a long moment they stood looking at each other. Then Amyntas moved aside to let the other come to the fountain. As the stranger ducked under the falling water, Amyntas saw his back. From shoulder to flank it was criss-crossed with thin strips of metal, flashing silver in the sunlight, and malleable, moving as he moved. 

He must have made some betraying sound or movement, because the other boy ducked out from under the water, thrusting the wet russet hair out of his eyes, and demanded curtly, "Have you never seen a Spartan back before?" 

So that was it. Amyntas, like everyone else, had heard of the strange flesh-bonds the Spartan racers had with their pods, and how they mutilated their own bodies to create the bond, dedicating themselves to courage before the shrine of Artemis Orthia. 

"No," he said. "I am Athenian." He did not add that he hoped to see plenty of Spartan backs when he started his military service. The cheap jibe came neatly into his head, and yet he did not even want to speak it. Here at Olympia, the Truce of the Games was not just a rule of conduct, but something in one's heart. Instead, he added, "And my name is Amyntas." 

They seemed to stand confronting each other for a long time. Then the Spartan boy smiled; a slow, rather grave smile, but unexpectedly warm. "And mine is Leon." 

"And you're a podracer." Amyntas noted the way he stood. 

"I am entered for the Four Hundred Miles in my racepod, the _Lion_." 

"Then we race against each other." 

Leon said in the same curt tone, "May we both race well."

Amyntas, who usually found it difficult to talk to strangers, was surprised to hear himself saying, "I have seen nothing of Olympia yet. Shall we get some clothes on and have a look round?"

Leon gave him another slow smile, but at that moment a hand clamped down on Amyntas' shoulder: Hippias, his trainer. "Oh no you don't, my lad! Five days' break in training is long enough!"

* * *

Amyntas and Leon, after that, spent much of their free time together, what little they had. There was still a month's time until the Games, and though the last month's training was the hardest, Amyntas could not spend all his time on the racing track. But there was always technique to study, ad-hoc repairs to carry out, and when all else failed, Hippias would doubtless insist that Amyntas go and polish his racepod to perfection before going anywhere with Leon. 

One late afternoon, in the time between giving his pod the last of a thousand polishes and the dinner hour, Amyntas and Leon took their pods spaceward, using the rocket boosters to get to the ring of asteroids that surrounded Olympia. Some said that the asteroids were remains of a larger Moon, broken into a million pieces in some great cataclysm, but others insisted that asteroids had always drifted around the planet, and were part of its radiance and glory. 

The pods were originally small shuttlecraft, used at times to ferry goods and passengers between ships in Deep Space, and though they were not equipped with an FTL Drive, could move at a good speed with their booster rockets. Amyntas and Leon went springing up into the asteroid field, chasing each other around the spinning rocks, laughing into their radios, trading remarks about the other racers and their chances. 

"The Rhodian's a good racer," Leon said, skimming over a wide spinning rock against the black. 

"Him? He uses all the pod's power too quickly," Amyntas countered. "He'll use up all his fuel at first and leave nothing for the home stretch. Myself, I fancy the Macedonian's chances." 

Leon sounded thoughtful. "He's well enough for speed, and he knows when and how to use it....What do you give for Nikomedes' chances?" 

"The boy from Megara?" Amyntas thought back to yesterday's practice. "Not much, from the form he's shown so far, but but we've only seen him at practice, and he's the sort that sometimes finds the fire when it comes to the real thing..." 

There was a long silence on the radio then, and they winged along over a stretch of ice asteroids, glimmering white against the darkness. Then Amyntas said, "I think you are the one I have most to fear." 

Leon laughed over the radio. "Have you only just woken to that? I knew the same thing of _you_ three days ago." 

And they were both silent again, a little shocked, until Amyntas said, "Come on, it's time we were getting back." 

Leon shot ahead as they came near to the end of the asteroid field, and between one instant and the next, caught a small rock, merely the size of his own hand, smashing through the booster tank and releasing all the fuel into space. 

Amyntas reacted without thinking, swinging toward him. "You have to dock with me!" he said frantically into the radio. 

Leon sounded stressed. "It's nothing! I can fix it!"

"You can't get back to Olympia on no fuel!" Amyntas said. "Release your docking clamps, now!"

Leon sighed over the radio. "Very well!" he said, and to Amyntas' relief, he heard the whoosh and click of his own docking clamps pulling the _Lion_ in. He waited for a few seconds to be sure Leon was fully settled, then dived for the surface of the planet. 

Back on the ground, Eudorus, one of the starship captains, ran up to the two linked pods. "Run into trouble?" he asked Leon. 

"Ran into an inconvenient asteroid," Leon said, looking away, abashed. "It cut my fuel line." 

"The fuel line, eh?" Eudorus said. "You are Spartan, I think?" 

"Yes," Leon said, gritting his teeth, and turning to examine the damage. 

"Amyntas, go and find the Spartan trainer," Eudorus said. "Leon, let me have a look." 

Amyntas caught one parting glimpse of Leon's face as he moved away to let Eudorus in, pale with anger and worry. He knew he would have been just as furious in Leon's place. All this fuss over a completely avoidable mistake! And the Games only three weeks off. 

He set off in search of the trainer.

* * *

Leon had to break training for three days while repairs were made to his pod, and it was several more before he could do a full training session. The damage to the pod was more than just to the booster tanks, and several parts had to be shipped in from Sparta to fix it. The nature of Spartan pods meant that this one was custom-designed just for him; he could not have just practiced in any old pod like Amyntas would have been able to do in his place. 

But with still more than a week to go, the repairs were pronounced complete, and both his trainer and the racing officials declared him fit to race, and his name remained on the list of entrants for the Four Hundred Miles.

And then it was the First Day of the Festival, the day when each competitor must go before the Council to be looked over and identified, and take the Oath of the Games before the great bronze statue of Zeus of the Thunderbolts. Amyntas marched in with the rest of those from the _Athena_ , and heard his own name called, and Leon's, among names from the _Samos_ , the _Cyrene_ , the _Crete_ , the _Corinth_ , the _Argos_ , and the planets Rhodia, Macedonia, and Megara. 

He smelled the incense on the morning air, and felt for the first time, under his swelling pride in being from the _Athena_ , the thread of his own humanity interwoven with the humanity of all the others. This must have been, a little, the thing that their Great Grandfathers had felt when they stood together, four hundred years ago, to hurl back the whole strength of the alien invaders, so that they might remain free. That had been in a Games year, too. 

That night Amyntas went to bed with the sound of engines thrumming behind his ears. He seemed to hear it in his dreams all night, but when he woke in the morning, it had turned into the sounds of the gathering crowd. This was the Day, and the crowd gathering in the Stadium to see him off was his crowd, and the skin prickled at the back of his neck. 

He lay for a few moments, listening, then got up and went out to the fountain, as he had that first day. Leon came after him. 

"How is the pod?" Amyntas asked. 

"I can't see where the hole was," Leon answered, "unless I look for it." 

They stood looking at each other, the friendship they had never put into words trying to find some way to reach across from one to the other. 

"We cannot even wish each other luck," Amnytas said at last, helplessly. 

And Leon said, almost exactly as he had said it at their first meeting: "May we both race well." 

They reached out and touched hands quickly, then went their separate ways.

* * *

The next time they saw each other, they were waiting in their pods to be hoisted into the Stadium. The Dolichus, the long distance race, and the Two Hundred Miles were both finished. Now the trumpet was sounding for the Four Hundred Miles. Amyntas' eyes went to meet Leon's, and found the Spartan boy's slightly frowning gaze waiting for him. Hippias was murmuring last minute advice over the radio but Amyntas did not hear a word of it as he was lifted into the air and swung out into the Stadium. 

His heart was hammering, his belly churning, and the palms of his hands were wet. The beginnings of panic were whimpering up in him. He looked again at Leon next to him as they settled down into the dust of the racetrack, and saw him run the tip of his tongue over his lips as though they were suddenly dry. The sight gave him a sense of companionship that somehow steadied him. He began to take deep quiet breaths, wiped his hands off on his pilot's outfit, and settled them calmly at the controls. 

Before him the racetrack, familiar from a month's worth of practice, and a thousand hours in the simulator, stretched white in the sunlight, an infinity of emptiness and distance. 

The Umpire was signalling for them to be ready, and then the starting trumpet yelped, and the line of pods sprang forward. 

Amyntas set the controls to proceed smoothly, without hurry. Let the green racers fly ahead; they would use up their fuel before they reached the final descent. He and Leon were flying neck-and-neck with the Macedonian. The Rhodian had gone ahead now after the front-runners, the rest were still bunched. 

They were flying over a wide desert now under a blue cloudless sky. Then the Corinthian made a push, passing the Rhodian. Something sounded off about his machine, and he fell back almost immediately. 

The desert gave way to mountains, and Amyntas began to climb higher, where there was less oxygen, and so the fuel would be used up faster. Snow-topped mountains flew by as he ascended, Leon still level with him. 

The bunch thinned out, the front-runners dropping back, and as they came toward the coordinates that marked the turning point, first the boy from Macedonia, and then Nikomedes firing forward at last, slid into the lead, with Amyntas and Leon close behind. 

At the turning point, Amyntas swung out too wide, almost immediately recognising the error, and catching himself. But Leon had gone ahead, his turn much swifter due to the immediacy of his bond with the machine, and Amyntas slowly began feeding more fuel into the engine, knowing that he would have to catch up. 

They were a quarter of the way back when they passed Nikomedes, the boy from Megara, who had found his fire too late. They were beginning to overhaul the Macedonian boy; and Amyntas knew in his thundering heart that unless something unexpected happened, the race must be between himself and Leon. 

Spartan and Macedonian were going neck and neck now; the position held for a little while, and then Leon gradually pulled ahead. Amyntas was going all out, engine roaring with no more thought for saving fuel, but still the pod with Leon in it was just ahead. 

And then suddenly Amyntas knew that something was wrong; a thin greenish fluid was seeping from the _Lion_ and it was beginning to lose the first keen edge of speed. The hole had reopened. 

He went on flying, but for a swift moment his head seemed quite apart from his hands moving on the controls and he was filled with an unmanageable swirl of thoughts and feelings. Leon might have hit his top speed anyway, it might be nothing to do with the leak--but the hole had reopened...to lose the race because of a fuel leak...it would be so easy not to fling the pod forward with that final desperate effort that he needed. Then Leon would keep his lead...and at the same time another part of himself was remembering his father standing in the docking zone as the _Paralos_ drew away--sending the message that he was not racing only for himself but for his station and his people...a victor's crown would be the greatest thing that anyone could give his friend...it would be an insult to Leon to let him win...you could not do that to your friend....

And then, like a clean cold sword of light cutting through the swirling tangle of his thoughts, came the knowledge that greater than any of these things were the Gods. These were Sacred Games, not some play-race between boys. He remembered what he had sent to his father in the last moment before the docking clamps disconnected: _"I'll race the best race I have in me, Father -- and if the Gods let me win, I'll remember that I'm winning for us both."_

He drove himself forward in one last agonising burst of speed, the final dredges of fuel going into the engines. He was level with Leon -- and then there was nothing ahead of him but the finishing line. 

He had no fuel left for a controlled descent; he spun down, all but falling out of the sky, landing hard. He was shaken, felt sick, his breath coming hard as he skidded to a halt. His hands were shaking as he removed them from the controls, and then Hippias burst in, pulling him up out of the pilot's chair and out onto the track, to the roar of the crowd. The sickness began to ease; he heard friendly voices congratulating him, and Eudorus came through the crowd with a gold ribbon to tie around his head in earnest of the victor's crown he would receive in the ceremony at the end of the Games. 

But when he looked around for Leon, the Spartan boy had been swept away by his trainer. And a queer desolation rose in Amyntas and robbed the moment of its glory.

* * *

Amyntas hung about in the changing room, sitting on the long bench near the water fountain, staring out across the white marble floor, until Leon emerged from his cubicle and came straight across to meet him, as though they had arranged it. His face was unreadable as usual. 

"Do you want a drink?" Amyntas said, mainly because someone had to say something, and filled a cup with water from the fountain. 

Leon took it from him and drank, sitting down on the bench beside him. Amyntas pulled off the victor's ribbon impatiently, dropping it between them on the bench. 

"Why did you do that?" Leon asked. 

"I shall never be sure whether I won that race."

"The judges are not often mistaken, and I never yet heard of Eudorus tying a victor's ribbon on the wrong person." 

Amyntas gestured in the general direction of their pods. "You know well enough what I mean. I'll never be sure if I'd have come first past the post, if your fuel line hadn't opened up again." 

Leon looked at him for a moment, then threw up his head and laughed. "Do you really think that made any difference? It would take more than a bit of lost fuel to stop me, Athenian! -- You raced better, that is all." He said this in such a harsh, bragging way that Amyntas felt stung, and wondered if it was Spartan pride, or simply Leon in hurt and anger speaking the truth. 

Either way, he was too tired to be angry back again. And whichever it was, it seemed that Leon shook it off quickly. The noon break ended with trumpets sounding for the Pentathlon. "Up!" Leon said. "Are you going to let it be said that your own event is the only one that interests you?" 

They went out, quickly and together.

* * *

Eventually the last day of all, the Crowning Day, came, and ever after, Amyntas remembered that day as a quietness within himself after great stress and turmoil. His name was announced as the victor of the boys' Four Hundred, and a gold crown was pressed upon his head, and later, a great feast was held. He looked up through the glass roof and could see, above all, the winged tripods on the roof of the great temple, outlined against the light sparkling down from the reflection of an asteroid belt. 

Next morning, in the hustle of departure, he and Leon contrived to meet for a little while and slip off on their own, sitting by the fountain in the common area of their lodging-place. 

Already they were remembering that there was a war between the _Athena_ and the _Sparta_ , that the Truce of the Games would last them back to their own stations but no further, and the longer the silence lasted, the more they remembered. 

"By this time tomorrow everyone will be gone," Amyntas said at last. "It will be as it was before we came, for another four years." He wished he could give Leon something, but there was nothing among his few belongings that would make sense in the Spartan's world. Too far for a signal to reach, too far to call. 

He put out a hand quickly, as if to hold the other boy back for a moment, and Leon's hand came to meet it. 

"It has been good. All this month, it has been good," Leon said. 

"It has been good," Amyntas agreed. He wanted to say, "Until the next Games, then." But manhood and the military tattoos were only a few months away for them both; if they did meet at another Games, there would be the faces of dead comrades, Spartan or Athenian, between them; and like enough, for one of them or both, there would be no other Games. Far more likely, if they ever saw each other again, it would be staring each other down with warpods and laser fire between them. 

He had noticed before how, despite their different worlds, he and Leon sometimes thought the same thing at the same time, and answered each other as though the thought had been spoken. Leon said in his abrupt, dead-level voice, "The Gods be with you, Amyntas, and grant that we never meet again." 

They put their arms around each other's necks and strained fiercely close for a moment. 

"The Gods be with you, Leon."

Then Hippias was calling, "Amyntas! Amyntas! We're waiting!" 

And Amyntas turned and ran towards where the Athenian shuttle was docking and Hippias was coming back to look for him. 

As they rose up from the ground of Olympia into the sky to meet the _Paralos_ , Amyntas did not look back.


End file.
